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Google85 writes "Now that Nokia has shifted to a Windows Phone-centric smartphone strategy, it's only natural for the company to divest itself of responsibility with regard to the Qt framework. It has been announced Digia will acquire the Qt commercial licensing and services business from Nokia, including the transfer of some 3,500 desktop and embedded customers actively using Qt today."

All 350 of us have 10 desktops apiece. That's easily 3500 users. One is for regular day-to-day use, one is for running my webbrowser in a clean state to reduce tracking, while the other 8 are for testing hangs, crashes, and other bugs, with clean.kde directories.

MeeGo has existed for just over a year, and is still underway. Nokia's failure was entirely internal and resulted in them obstructing the growth of Maemo. Don't point and MeeGo and say "it has failed" when you actually mean Nokia.

All of those vendors also sell Linux devices. And all but Sony actively support Linux. If Redmond Washington fall off into the ocean tomorrow, they still have viable product, especially Sony. Nokia, on the other hand will have nothing.

And the path that they were taking earlier was going to be super successful right?

Why do you trolls have to phrase it as an either/or situation? Windows Phone 7 is a flop [computerworld.com] and Nokia hitched their wagon to it. There were other options. [msn.com]

Like HP, Dell, Asus, Acer, Sony ?

Yeah, their Windows lap dogs are doing reasonably well fighting over the scraps.

Umm, if Android was chosen, won't Nokia be fighting for the 'scraps' with Motorola, HTC, Samsung, Sony, etc. as you put it? Be consistent!

Atleast MS was offering them a better deal because it's a nascent platform, Google's wouldn't even care much at this point. And I thought Goldman Sachs analysts were riled on here? Unless it's to suit you I guess. Anyway, Nokia jumping on might make it

Why is it that people that rail against capitalism are steadfastly resistant to giving up all of their own capital?

Probably because giving up your capital doesn't get you out of capitalism. It only makes your position inside capitalism worse.

Oh, sure, it will get you "out of" capitalism. Just don't confuse capitalism with banking. "Capital" is just having a way to get food for dinner without spending your day gathering food. If you don't like that lifestyle, just give it up and live hand-to-mouth.

All systems in the civilized world use capitalism. The question is should individuals be allowed to control their own capital, or just a few select individuals?

Um, sociopaths generally ARE rationally self-interested, as a rule, and much more so than other people. That's the problem with them. The rest of us have morality, so if there's an action that we could do to benefit ourselves, but which will hurt other people, we generally won't do it. A sociopath won't consider the other people, so he'll just do it.

Sociopaths who are smart tend to do very well in life, because they don't have to worry about that morality stuff slowing them down. So they rise up in soci

Sounds like another Novell/SCO is in the works 5 years down the line with Digia taking over the SCOfud. SCO tried to make great hay that no one sells a business without copyrights. Unsurprisingly, this proves SCO to BE WRONG.

It's way too predictable. The person in charge of Nokia has a LOT of Microsoft stock and no Nokia stock, or so I've read. It was this that upset Nokia employees the most -- it was clear from the beginning where this person's interests would lie. And so now it is all coming to pass.

And it's not like Microsoft's previous dealings with phone makers were resulted in anything better. I seem to recall a story from years ago when Microsoft was initially trying to get a phone making partner to work with them --

Why do you think the board hired him in the first place in place of the local talent and VPs ? They obviously knew by that time that Meego was a failed project and they had to go in the new direction. They probably decided by then that WP7 or Android was the way to go and hired the new boss accordingly.

Uhhhh...You DO know the fed stopped him from buying Nokia and selling off his shares of MSFT under insider trading rules, yes? And that anyone who takes one of the high level positions in a company like CxO has to follow insider trading rules that only allow them to sell X number of stock per six months and IIRC not to buy ANY of the stock of the company they have joined for 6 months, too keep from having their knowledge affect pricing?

If you want to blame someone for his stock situation blame the fed, as

No, I didn't know that actually. The last I heard was as I stated. This is news to me.

So whooops! I was wrong.

Yeah, I would rather see Nokia going Android than Windows. Sure Nokia would be competing in a much more difficult market teeming with competition, but it's better than dying. Every Windows phone I have seen to date has sucked. Even "typical end users" found them intolerable.

In a race to the bottom, that leaves a nice niche at the top. Sure there is a bunch of cheap crap. There are also few very good phones that are not totally locked down (HelloMoto) and trapped. The point is that they dumped all the alternatives, and joined up with a very risky venture. The problem is that the normal panic war cry is too short. It is "We have do do something." It should be "We have to do something helpful."

'Kinda risky' is putting it mildly. Watching Nokia is like watching an alcoholic drinking themselves to death. It's tragic.

I doubt it's death, so much as transformation. Before the announcement Nokia was an innovator producing distinct hardware & software. After the announcement they become one of Microsoft's bitches pumping out handsets which are substantially similar to the likes coming out from LG / Samsung / HTC. Perhaps it's cheaper to do, but at the end of the day Nokia's brand will be severely tarnished.

It's also worth noting that Nokia is the only manufacturer to bet the farm on a single phone OS vendor. LG, Samsung and HTC all have their fingers in many pies (e.g. WP7, Android, Bada, Brew). It seems like a good way to hedge if the WP7 ship sinks which is entirely possible.

'Kinda risky' is putting it mildly. Watching Nokia is like watching an alcoholic drinking themselves to death. It's tragic.

I doubt it's death, so much as transformation. Before the announcement Nokia was an innovator producing distinct hardware & software. After the announcement they become one of Microsoft's bitches pumping out handsets which are substantially similar to the likes coming out from LG / Samsung / HTC. Perhaps it's cheaper to do, but at the end of the day Nokia's brand will be severely tarnished.

It's also worth noting that Nokia is the only manufacturer to bet the farm on a single phone OS vendor. LG, Samsung and HTC all have their fingers in many pies (e.g. WP7, Android, Bada, Brew). It seems like a good way to hedge if the WP7 ship sinks which is entirely possible.

It's death of Nokia as a respected brand, sooner or later it will be death of Nokia entirely.

'Kinda risky' is putting it mildly. Watching Nokia is like watching an alcoholic drinking themselves to death. It's tragic.

I doubt it's death, so much as transformation. Before the announcement Nokia was an innovator producing distinct hardware & software. After the announcement they become one of Microsoft's bitches pumping out handsets which are substantially similar to the likes coming out from LG / Samsung / HTC. Perhaps it's cheaper to do, but at the end of the day Nokia's brand will be severely tarnished.

It's also worth noting that Nokia is the only manufacturer to bet the farm on a single phone OS vendor. LG, Samsung and HTC all have their fingers in many pies (e.g. WP7, Android, Bada, Brew). It seems like a good way to hedge if the WP7 ship sinks which is entirely possible.

It's death of Nokia as a respected brand, sooner or later it will be death of Nokia entirely.

I'll argue that Nokia was already on it's death bed (as a respected brand), they were completely missing in the smart phone market, which is the market you need to be in if you want to be a respected cell phone manufacturer brand. Yes, they were working on neat products, but it seemed that they were quite a bit away from shipping (and being new, they carried a lot of risk as well).

I think that Nokia was forced to going third party, where the choices are Android and WP7. think going with WP7 was a good i

I'll argue that Nokia was already on it's death bed (as a respected brand), they were completely missing in the smart phone market, which is the market you need to be in if you want to be a respected cell phone manufacturer brand. Yes, they were working on neat products, but it seemed that they were quite a bit away from shipping (and being new, they carried a lot of risk as well).

Nokia did have smart phone offerings such as the C7. The C7 has been praised for its hardware and the software is tolerable but most reviews suggest Symbian is just poor by comparison to iOS or Android.

I really don't understand why they didn't just dump Symbian for Android. They could have skinned it to look like Symbian, maybe even include a Symbian / QT runtime so apps still work, and integrate Ovi in there too. Then they'd have a modern smart phone with legacy support and they'd be back in the game wh

I really don't understand why they didn't just dump Symbian for Android. They could have skinned it to look like Symbian

WTF!

The good bit of Symbian - uses orders of magnitude less resources that the competition.

The bad bit - the UI from hell.

And you suggest putting a Symbian UI on Android?

Like I said, WTF.

(Check out SBP mobile shell for Symbian to see what could have been done if Nokia weren't totally fucked up. Look at it running on a low-end piece of junk like the 5320 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZtKTOTus7s [youtube.com] ).

I think it's pretty obvious that Nokia are being given hundreds of millions, possibly billions in order to transition to Windows Phone 7. Companies don't make such radical u-turns and run straight into their enemy's camp without a large financial incentive behind it.

Nokia died as a reputable brand when they kept trying to sell their pieces of junk as smartphones. They wanted in on the iPhone market but really couldn't bring anything other than rehashes of a dumbphone with browsers.

I really think Nokia made a terrible decision throwing everything behind WP7. As was stated by GGP, Nokia has cirrhosis and still visits the pub every night.

After the announcement they become one of Microsoft's bitches pumping out handsets which are substantially similar to the likes coming out from LG / Samsung / HTC.

Not quite. There's no "dedicated" WP7 vendor so far - all of the companies you've listed mostly do Android phones (Samsung is also pushing its Bada on low-cost phones); WP is the odd one in their lineup. Nokia, meanwhile, could become the maker of WP phones - much like HTC did back in the day when they rode the WinMo wave. The trick is in knowing when to jump off.

Hardware guidelines mostly define the baseline, and can be higher. IIRC the only restriction on that is screen resolution, which is fixed at 800x480 (though app developers were already warned to expect a higher second option coming eventually, and should code their stuff accordingly). Oh yes, and ARM as an architecture. It seems to me that there's still a lot of leeway there if one wants to "innovate".

Well, Nokia still owns Qt... Digia is only handling the commercial software licensing and professional services for Qt. Basically, Digia are licensed to sell the product, but Nokia still owns and develops it in-house.

Remember, there CEO is a softie, and due to the nature of the laws over there, is not able to own any sizable amount of stock in the company. All of his stock is in Microsoft. I think it is reasonable to say if WM7 fails, Microsoft stock will take a hit. Right now all of is value and worth is in Microsoft stock. Plus he has drank the MS tainted kool-aid for years. Any technology not created in Redmond is NOT good technology....unless Microsoft can buy it.

They had to.... the writing on the wall was clear for the future of Symbion.... a dead end with no future compared to an operating system that hosts the potential for open-ended application acquisition. In this case it was the marriage of two partners that were desperate for complementary ends. Microsoft needed a hardware vendor that would give it's Mobile platform a renewed reason for existence. And Nokia was left to choose between Google and Microsoft. (remember that while Android may be "free", it

this is a former Microsoft exec, now CEO of Nokia, handing Nokia over to Microsoft as a phone asset. If you don't think so, read his speech of the deal and specifically the part on why Google was not an option. The stuff about Google being a threat to them was 100% Microsoft type fear and should have had nothing to do with Nokia.I'm happy to see they are not killing it outright but time will tell if the new owner isn't also a Microsoft "friend" and pulls the plug or does something effectively the same, ie m

Yes and no. In publicly traded companies, perception is freqently more important than reality. From a public investor's perspective, showing you're fully committed to Windows rather than half in with hedged bets, can go a long, long ways toward ensuring investor confidence. That's not to say it necessarily worked, but chances are, that's at least part of the equation.

I wouldn't go as far as some, and claim that ALL deals with MS are expensive to the one making the deal, but there are a large number of cases where they have "stolen" IP of various sorts (though never trademarks) via either tricky contracts, or just outright. A small enough company doesn't have much hope in defending itself against MS. Even if they win, they lose. (The court damages never cover the real damages.) Several of these cases have made the news, and when one figures that most companies would

... while they still could. There was a "poison pill" [nokia.com] in the QT acquisition

(For those of you who don’t know what it is, the KDE Free Qt Foundation is what we call a “poison pill” for Trolltech: should we ever stop releasing open source versions of Qt, the foundation is given the right to unilaterally release the last version of Qt under the BSD license.

Well, they didn't. They new about this arrangement when they bought Trolltech and I'd hardly call it a 'poison pill'. For all the work and testing that open source developers put into Qt it was always there to ensure that Trolltech played fair whilst still keeping their ability to create separately licensed versions on the commercial side. The arrangement has always worked very well.

A defensive strategy used by a corporation to discourage a hostile takeover by another company. Poison pills are used to make the target company less attractive to the acquirer. There are two types of poison pills: (1) A flip-in allows existing shareholders (except the acquirer) to buy more shares at a discount. (2) A flip-over allows stockholders to buy the acquirer's shares at a discounted price after the merger.

What does that agreement say about the case where they start releasing versions that contain features patented by another company, but which they have an agreement with such that they won't get sued...but nobody else is protected? I'd bet that that counts as releasing an open source version, even if you don't dare use it.

What does that agreement say about the case where they start releasing versions that contain features patented by another company, but which they have an agreement with such that they won't get sued...but nobody else is protected? I'd bet that that counts as releasing an open source version, even if you don't dare use it.

This was one of the considerations in the wording of the GPL3.

That would still be a violation of the GPL v2, as it would be a restriction on downstream recipients ability to do anything they want with the code, including, but not limited to, distribution of the code and compiling and running it for any purpose whatsoever.

I assume Digia are after commercial licensing fees, service agreements and support contracts for Qt and will attempt to build up the user base.

Kinda sad to see Nokia vanish into a death spiral though. I really cannot see Windows based smart phones gaining traction against iPhone/Android unless they are really something special or are heavily discounted. I find the whole business tactic fairly incomprehensible to be honest, but I am assuming other people know more than me here.

Given Nokia's position what else could they have done to preserve the market share? Any Ideas?

Randomly assigning more people doesn't help, I agree. However they could have assigned some engineers to code a new email client, maybe just clone the one for Android. The poor quality and clumsy interface of their email client caused complaints about Nokia smartphones for a long time - both on Symbian and Maemo. Email was a very important functionality for their customers, so they should have fixed that long ago.

I'm personally concerned with having the same OS on handheld, tablet, and desktop. I don't want to maintain multiple software ecosystems.

Then you should have loved Maemo. It was pretty much Debian. While I haven't seen a Debian tablet yet, I do know that Debian Works For Me very well on my laptop, servers and smartphone, so that's two out of three.

with the convergence of ios and osx and android 3.0 for tablets, the future is largely 'single ecosystem'.Unfortunately for intel i can't see meego gaining much traction against those 2.A 3rd player needs a mini-Apple zeal in producing a focussed product delivery. HP? Their roadmap for webos looks promising and unlike nokia have concrete timeframes.Solution? Partner hp-intel. Webos dumps qualcomm and directfb for wayland and a powervr based soc like omap4. Powervr is also embedded in atom! So both companies

Nokia did not sell Qt to Digia. They sold the Qt commercial license business to Digia. Digia will now sell Qt licenses to companies like Adobe or Google who want to make closed-source modifications to Qt. Development of Qt itself will remain inside Nokia. Nokia will continue to develop Qt.

So let me get this straight. They're no longer making phones that will use Qt. They no longer have a financial interest in other companies adopting Qt for use in closed source products. They are still letting their developers work on Qt on company time. Exactly how long do you think they are going to maintain this state of affairs, given the time that elapsed between the announcement of the adoption of Windows Phone 7 ("but don't worry, we're not abandoning Qt") and this announcement?

they 'hope' to continue selling Qt-capable symbian devices by the truckload until their wp7 offering is ready. With an already declining market share they'll have to cut into margins. i.e. Superior hardware against android oems.In short, nokia have 9 months, not 2 years. WP7 phones must be shipping in xmas stockings or they're doomed. iPhone5 will be out...

This is the commercial licensing side of Qt, *NOT* Qt. The major thing that will matter to the open source community is whether Qt will still be developed as a robust cross platform toolkit, not so much what happens to the commercial licensing business. Even Qt's future on phones doesn't concern me too much - the smart phone industry moving towards "app store" models and locked down platforms is a much bigger concern. (I'm just waiting for Apple to announce they're moving to an App Store model for all their desktop machines...)

Where Qt really shines is as a toolkit for graphical applications on the desktop. THAT's what ultimately concerns me - will the developers who have made Qt such an outstanding cross platform graphical toolkit will be allowed to continue their work as a paid, full time job? Never mind the phones, KDE and a vast array of non-KDE desktop applications that are important parts of the open source ecosystem rely on Qt (especially those that have to deploy on Windows). Would the commercial Linux vendors step in to keep the Qt devs programming, much as they have hired Linux kernel folk in the past? Libreoffice indicates they will act to protect key elements of open source, so fingers crossed. A statement along those lines would be reassuring, if they are in fact able and willing to fall back to that solution if necessary.

Nokia did not 'sell Qt'. It selected a partner to sell commercial licenses and support services, a task that is currently done by Nokia. Qt is offered under two licenses - commercial and LGPL - and the large (majority in fact) base of non commercial users are not impacted by this change.

The agreement lets Nokia focus on Qt for its core businesses, and ensures Qt commercial customers - mainly in the desktop and embedded space - are given top service by a company that has commercial Qt licensing at the core of its interests.

The development of Qt has not been sold or outsourced and is not impacted by this change. Nokia's commitment to advancing and developing Qt for all Qt users has not changed - it remains commited.

You can read some more details at http://blog.qt.nokia.com/2011/03/07/nokia-and-digia-working-together

Qt-Gon Jinn: Do you hear that flushing sound?Jar-Jar Nokia: *Nod*Qt-Gon Jinn: That is the sound of you flushing your business down to toilet.Nemoidian Ballmer: BRING ME NEW ASSMONKEY!Jar-Jar Nokia: My fucked up! My fucked up!

the results show Digia as a big Microsoft fan, supporter, customer, partner.

Watch Qt licensing and support fees to skyrocket to drive Qt out of the market. Nokia won't be implicated but that is probably the plan. Anything cross platform has _always_ been a threat to Microsoft and they have done everything legal and many time illegal to destroy these. Qt is a threat to Microsoft and destroying Qt also helps them hurt companies like Google and Adobe who base many of their tools and products on Qt. IMO

Digia is just a quite generic Finnish integrator / consulting company with a large mobile division (relatively speaking) and some own products that they sell mostly domestically e.g Progress based ERP and mobile company phonebook with multiplatform support. They do partner with about any main stream software vendor like Microsoft, Oracle, IBM or Progress. I do not think they are particularly evil unless they got paid big time for being one.

I knew a guy who ran a small consulting biz and once he signed to be a Microsoft "Partner" he could not accept contracts using competing tools. So when I see so many tags showing a Digia & Microsoft Partner program membership, it stands to reason they will not do good things with the cross platform Qt. Cross platform anything has always put a bullseye on it for Microsoft to aim at and take out. It started in the early 90s with cross platform C++ frameworks, moved to 3D OpenGL and kept going from there.

Ever since the Qt acquisition by Nokia, Qt on the desktop has been neglected in favour of the latest shiny mobile thing. Now that commercial customers finally get someone to talk to who do not have years to catch up on their competition (and are understandably a bit busy), we might expect desktop features to move forward as well.

Granted, some of the things that is coming out of the mobile efforts also do greatly benefit the desktop side, but still, the focus has clearly been elsewhere.

I don't like Objective-C (after releasing 5 iPhone apps) because my code is useless outside the iPhone/iPad. Plus I have to use xcode which is yards behind eclipse and even Visual Studio. My dream would be to program in C++ once for multiple platforms and to have my choice of original development platform as well as IDE.. I am not a fan of Java plus it looks like Apple is going to keep putting shots into the head of Java so to do anything Apple means avoiding Java.
In any given month I maintain/develop in a